A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

was to keel over right then, we would have to sell part of the farm to pay the inheritance taxes. Sam and Arabella had paid $52 an acre for a quarter section, a hundred sixty acres. The price was low because of the standing water, and Samand Arabella were right in suspecting that some of their neighbors in Mason City were amused at their expense, imagine having bought a piece of land, sight unseen, a piece of malarial marsh, imagine having been such a latecomer, and so foolish, and so young.
    In the thirties, when my father and grandfather added two more pieces, they still paid less than $90 an acre, and that was for tiled, improved land. The family they bought the land from moved away to Minneapolis first, then California, but when I was a child in the fifties, Bob Stanley’s father, Newt, still wasn’t speaking to my father because he had aced the Stanley brothers out of some sort of a deal—Newt and the wife in the departed family were cousins. The Depression, for our family, was a time of careful consolidation of holdings through hard work, good luck, smart farming. Of course, that wasn’t how everyone in Zebulon County saw it, but my father would say, “Envy likes to talk.” At any rate, all that marshy land was like compost, pure fertility, and in 1979 the market value of my father’s land was $3200 an acre, at the very pinnacle of land values in Zebulon County and in the whole state. His thousand acres, then, made him a millionaire more than three times over, especially as it was paid for.
    “It’s Marv Carson who’s put this bug in his ear,” was what Ty said to me when we were getting ready for bed that night.
    I said, “It was Harold’s tractor that drove him over the edge.”
    “The tractor was Marv’s idea, too. Loren told me tonight that Marv’s been working on Harold since Christmas. Harold would like your dad to think he paid for it outright, but he didn’t. Loren wouldn’t tell me how much they put down, though. He said, ‘Shit, Ty, that little debt nestled right into our net worth and got lost.’ ”
    “One of those tractors costs forty thousand dollars.”
    “So, his land’s worth a million and a half. My dad’s farm’s worth almost half a million. I was thinking of selling that and using that money to expand the hog operation.” He looked at me and shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve been talking to Marv myself.”
    “It makes me feel weird to toss around all these high numbers. Anyway, who would buy at these prices? And everybody’s bitching about interest rates.”
    “But interest rates are always up, and maybe prices will go higher.”
    “Hunh.” I sat down in the window seat and looked down the road toward Rose’s house. All their lights were out. I said, “Rose looked beat when we left the party.”
    Ty said, “Those Slurrystores are great. They hold eighty thousand gallons of hog slurry. After it cools off, you can put it right in the field. I’d like one of those. And a hog confinement building. Air-conditioned. I want one of them, too. And, let’s see, how about a couple of champion boars, the kind whose breeding is so pure they can sit up to dinner with you and not spill anything on the tablecloth.” He lay back on the bed. “Sweet old pink boys named Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.”
    It was a rare thing for Ty to make wishes, so I listened to him without interrupting. He said, “You get a good breeding line of your own going and you can put those babies up for adoption. Everybody wants one. You can say, ‘Yeah, Jake, but you’ve got to feed him with your own spoon, and let him sleep on your side of the bed,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, Ty, anything. I’ve already started his college fund.’ ” He rolled over and smiled at me. “Or hers. Sows with that kind of endowment get all the benefits, too.”
    “That’s what I like about hogs. They get to grow up. I used to hate it when the Ericsons slaughtered their veal calves.”
    “I didn’t know they